Routers are employed to accomplish a variety of tasks. Used for shaping objects typically composed of wood, plastic, metal, composite materials, and the like, routers have become a mainstay of the construction work site and home work shops. Controlling the router while in operation has been the purview of many design configurations. The depth of cut provided by a router has been the focus of many different design configurations, from handles which can operably change the depth, to attachments which may be employed to adjust the depth, to base designs which allow an operator to vary cut depth. Unfortunately, the typical designs have required the use of non-integrated parts to accomplish these depth adjustments.
The adjustment mechanisms employed currently may also be limited by their ability to achieve satisfactory results. For instance, some adjustment mechanisms may be enabled to satisfactorily achieve coarse adjustments, allowing the operator to make significant changes in the depth of cut to be achieved, but fail to provide a satisfactory ability to fine adjust the depth of cut. Alternatively, adjustment mechanisms designed to provide fine adjustments may have overly burdensome mechanisms. For example, some current depth adjustment mechanisms may provide a limited number of predetermined stops which limit the flexibility of cut depth. Other current depth adjustment mechanisms may employ multiple stage depth adjust systems where the operator is required to adjust through the range of depth adjustment provided by one stage before being required to engage a secondary stage to make further adjustments.
It is common to see operators of routers being forced to employ external devices into designated regions of the router in order to achieve depth adjustment functionality. This design feature being based on the assumption that totally integrating a depth adjustment mechanism into a router would make the router too large, uncontrollable, or aesthetically displeasing.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide an aesthetically pleasing router which was enabled with a continuous metered depth adjusting functionality, increasing an operator's ability to make both coarse and fine adjustments, without requiring the use of external devices.